Television (TV) and radio is a now ubiquitous telecommunication medium used for broadcasting and receiving images and/or sound using radio frequency (RF) signals. All televisions and radios utilise a receiver system in one form or another. A receiver is an electronic circuit that receives its input from an antenna, uses one or more filters to separate a required signal from other signals picked up by the antenna, amplifies the required signal to an amplitude suitable for further processing, and finally demodulates and decodes the signal into a consumable form for the end user, e.g. sound, pictures, digital data, etc.
However, different countries use different types of broadcast standard for both television and radio signals, most of which are to varying extents incompatible with each other. As a result, receiver technology varies widely country to country according to the broadcast standard(s) in use.
For analogue TV, there are a wide range of different standards country to country. Examples of the most common analogue television standards are: PAL, NTSC, and SECAM. The situation with worldwide digital television (DTV) is arguably simpler by comparison, with most current digital television systems using an MPEG-2 video codec based on the MPEG-2 multiplexed data stream standard. However, the digital TV situation is complicated by the fact that digital standards differ significantly in the details of how the MPEG-2 stream is converted into a broadcast signal, and ultimately how it is decoded for viewing.
One standard by which DTV signals are transmitted is through Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), which represents a suite of internationally accepted open standards for digital television. DVB systems distribute signal data using a variety of approaches, including by satellite (DVB-S, DVB-S2 and DVB-SH; also DVB-SMATV for distribution via SMATV); cable (DVB-C); terrestrial television (DVB-T, DVB-T2) and digital terrestrial television for handhelds (DVB-H); and via microwave using DTT (DVB-MT), the MMDS (DVB-MC), and/or MVDS standards (DVB-MS).
Although DVB is widely used in Europe, North America uses ATSC (Advanced Television Systems Committee) standards and Japan uses the ISDB (Integrated Services Digital Broadcasting) standards. Each of these may be used over different broadcast media e.g. terrestrial, cable or satellite media. Depending on the medium, different modulations are used, e.g. COFDM (Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) for terrestrial transmissions, QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) for cable transmissions and QPSK (Quadrature Phase Shift Keying) for satellite transmissions.
The situation is similar in radio with analogue standards such as AM and FM and a range of digital standards such as Eureka 147 (branded as “DAB”), DAB+, HD Radio and so on.
The many incompatible broadcast transmission standards used in today's digital broadcasting market requires manufacture of dedicated receivers using dedicated algorithms to perform the necessary processing (demodulation, error correction, decoding, etc.) of received digital signals. However, having many dedicated solutions is undesirable for a number of reasons. For example, having receiver hardware customized for each standard increases the development costs and ultimately means that each individual product is tied to one standard, often operable in only one region. The upshot is that currently known technology is generally inflexible as well as expensive to make.
No currently known technology provides a multi-standard broadcast receiver which is compatible with any global transmission standard and easily upgraded to future standards. Furthermore, no currently known technology provides a broadcast receiver which utilizes general purpose computer hardware in order to efficiently reduce development, manufacturing and implementation costs.